Growlabs nabs $2.2M to automate outbound sales

Just six months into its life, Growlabs, a startup using machine intelligence to support outbound sales teams, has raised a $2.2 million seed round. Founded by Ben Raffi, the creator of ticketing app Universe, Jaclyn Klein and Safeer Jiwan, Growlabs helps businesses reduce their customer acquisition costs by enabling smalls sales teams to do more with less.

From his work with Universe, Raffi knows how difficult it can be to scale apps without ballooning CAC. Teams can spend upwards of 80 percent of their time researching and cold-emailing contacts with no guarantee that their efforts will lead to sales.

“We were doing lead generation and nothing was really good,” explained Raffi. “I had to duct tape a lot of things.”

With Growlabs, sales teams can specify the type of contact and business they want to target and the platform will automatically generate leads, begin sending emails and vet the inbound responses.

Growlabs combines machine learning with a database of 350 million prospects to identify and target the contacts with whom you’ll be most likely to close a sale. And by collecting data on every interaction, the platform is able to provide advice for users in determining when to send emails and how many follow-ups to attempt.

Beyond basic analytics, Growlabs has also implemented natural language processing for analyzing the content of emails. By classifying messaging, it can provide feedback on what pitches typically work best for specific management roles — a hook that impresses a CTO might fall completely flat for a CMO.

By choosing to charge clients on a per-qualified-lead-generated basis, Growlabs becomes a realistic option for smaller businesses that otherwise might not be able to afford a costly, SaaS-only, subscription. Raffi told me that Growlabs’ smallest clients typically use the service to send a few thousand emails per month, and larger clients have used it to push 20 to 30,000 emails.

Today’s round was composed of angels and other strategic investors with experience in B2B sales. Raffi hopes that these resources will help the eight-person team close its own sales with new small to medium-size businesses.